I have Parkinson's Disease. I've had it for nearly 20 years. For the first 15 or so it wasn't bad -- in fact, entire days would pass when I could almost forget I had it. But though individual days would pass unremarkably, individual weeks would not. Nor would months, or years. I was lucky enough to get in on the ground floor of a new surgical treatment: DBS (Deep Brain Stimulation). It's basically a pacemaker for the brain. It slowed the progress of the disease dramatically.
But it didn't stop it.
Because there's no cure.
That's because it's not a disease, as we currently define it; that is, it doesn't seem pathological in origin. A more suitable qualifier would be "Syndrome". But, though I'm uncertain of the terminology, I can describe what it's like. It's like being dipped in extremely slow-hardening cement. It's hard to get around much, unless I swallow a pharmacy's weight in pills every day. (Which aren't free, even with Medicare.) PD has also pretty much completely destroyed my ability to speak coherently. I can communicate sometimes, although most people aren't fluent in Village Idiot. (In fact, people are usually more fluent in Klingon.) It's become nearly impossible to type anymore. I used to be able to type over 100 wpm; now I'm lucky if I can do ten.
I've had over 400 TV scripts produced, and a half dozen movies; I've had 2 dozen novels published and a codswallop or two of comic books, graphic novels, and short stories. I've won an Emmy and been nominated for several more awards, including a Hugo and a Nebula. Yet whenever I go out in public people watch me like they expect me to start flinging my filth like a bored primate at the City Zoo.
If I had to pick one thing that I'd like to have changed about this motherfucking disease (please excuse my language; I meant to say motherfucking syndrome), it's my inability to speak. It's the result of a confluence of factors; a sub-syndrome of the larger one. As such, it can be possibly addressed symptomatically, which is a fairly arduous "two-steps-forward-one-step-back" process, or I can try to find a wholly different paradigm to address it through.
Which I may have done; theoretically, at least. I'm not prepared to say anything further at the moment -- but fingers crossed.
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Work In Progress
I'm going to try to talk a little about BLOOD KISS. It isn't easy, because the Parkinson's is flaring up quite a bit. My fingers are tremoring and it's very hard to get up any speed. I'm going to post this as a place holder and eventually I'll have more.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Bad Ol' Puddy Tat Blues
I think cats must lead lives of perennial existential despair.
Think about it. A cat operates heavily on instinct; not surprising when you consider its frontal lobes are the size of a shelled peanut. I remember one time our cat got out and didn't stop at the stairs -- instead she kept going. I watched for a second before we opened a can of food and hauled her up short, and every line in her furry body was saying "YES!!!" It's like she realized in that moment what was missing.
Now consider the fact that a cat has a theory of mind comparable to a rhododendron bush. It doesn't wonder if other cats feel this way; it's open to question if it wonders about other cats, period. As far as it knows, it's the only cat who's ever felt this way. And we've already established that a cat's hippocampus works in nanoseconds, so I wouldn't count on it retaining long, nostalgic memories.
Given all this, we're pretty much forced to one conclusion: that when your puddy tat sprawls languorously on the couch, staring off into space, it's not relaxing; on the contrary, it's caught in the throes of an existential crisis that would make Sartre run for the nearest exit. In effect, it's thinking that there's something missing in its life, something very important, but it can't quite remember what. So it lolls about in despair, and you think it wants its belly scratched, when in reality it's wracking its poor excuse for a brain for the answer to the ultimate ontological mystery.
No wonder they're stoned on catnip most of the time.
Speaking Of ...
The biggest problem Parkinson's presents for me is my voice.
It's the result of several different things. There's standard aphonia, which is the usual problem Parkinson's patients have, and which makes me sound much softer than I think I am. But there's also dysarthria, which causes slurring (such as that from a frontal lobe infarction); this is harder to pin down because the cause of pathology is unclear. It could have been a physical insult to my speech center -- or it could be something completely different. And there's also the butcher job that an E.N.T. did on my uvula, which causes extreme hypernasality.
Plus my lungs are weak; this is caused by lateral scoliosis not leaving them enough room. P.D. exacerbates this.
In short, while an operation may solve part of the problem, it might not solve it all. I'm reluctant to have my head unzipped just to see what's going on in there. The more research I do, the less inclined I am to believe that one procedure -- or even two or three -- will provide the Hail Mary pass that's needed here. I may have to settle for a cyborg-style mechanism that'll bypass my voice completely. Because it's looking more and more like, even a combination of brain surgery and reconstructive laryngeal surgery might not provide the magic bullet.
Friday, September 14, 2012
Happy Birthday To Me
I can't resist this,especially since I came across it on my birthday. It's the table of contents for an anthology called "the Mammoth Book Of Ghost Stories", edited by Otto Penzler, and if you look real carefully you'll find I'm in sandwiched in between people who really know what they're doing,like Saki and H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James and ... annd ...
It's like the saying goes ... I'm the only person in it I don't recognize.
Monday, September 10, 2012
CONQUEST OF SPACE
THE CONQUEST OF SPACE, a 1950s Disney(!) film, is a truly amazing movie.
You can find it on You-tube (of course). It bears watching by anyone who's an atheist.
Why? How? (SPOILERS ...) Certainly not for things like story; pedestrian at best (outside of ... well, you'll see), or acting; Ross Martin is the only non-cringeworthy thesp in the lot, and he doesn't last long. The rest are terrible, although they don't have much to work with -- they're all cultural stereotypes. (One gets the feeling that if a black crew member had been included, he'd be asking for watermelon-flavored food pills.) The vision of the future is the usual 1950's society with a couple of decades tacked on.
Nevertheless, it is truly amazing for one character's through-line only: the expedition's leader, a Bible-thumping Fundamentalist who comes to the conclusion during the voyage that leaving Earth without the permission of the Almighty is an offense unto Him, and who eventually sabotages the expedition before being killed by his own son.
Heavy stuff, for an obviously teen (at most) oriented family film. But what really had my jaw hanging was that there was no effort at all made at the end to absolve either the Captain (other than the fairly obvious conclusion that he was batshit crazy), or God. Nothing is said to the effect that it's cool with God for us to leave the cradle, nor is any attempt made to justify the Captain's actions (not among the crew, at least, although there is consensus that he'll be presented to the public as a martyr). But we get the strong sense that his faith had nothing to do with his sacrifice, or so they'll spin it. Again, hard as it is to believe, the film takes a very clear stand for atheism (or at least against organized religion), with no mealy-mouthed apologies.
Truly amazing ...
Monday, September 3, 2012
Spaceman Jones' Locker
The last post has kept me thinking about how different the solar system is from what we thought it was, even just fifty years ago. Was a time when Venus and Mars were the odds-on favorite for life.
And now?
My personal odds-on favorites for places most likely to support life in the solar system? Not what you'd think. First off, I wouldn't bother looking in the inner system. Mercury is blasted by a sun so close its apparent disc fills half the sky; even extremophiles would have to wear sunglasses. Venus? Oy. It's hell, pure and simple: victim of millions of years of rampant greenhouse effects that have turned the surface into seething lava beds and the atmosphere into a dense and boiling ocean of sulphuric acid. Mars? The best chance of all the inner worlds, but still not the way to bet. If only it were as big as Earth; but, as they said on Firefly, "if wishes were horses, we'd all be eating steak." Mars was simply too far from the sun, and too small to hang onto its core warmth, and thus its magnetosphere dissipated. With no magnetosphere to protect the planet (think of the magnetosphere as a planetary-sized deflector shield) from the sterilizing UV rays, there wasn't much chance for life to develop.
So we have to look further out. A lot further.
The two biggest planets in our solar system are Jupiter and Saturn. Together, they have over a hundred moons (hell, they probably have thousands if we count rocks from the size of baseballs on up. If you count all the rock and ice fragments making up the rings, we're into millions. This way lies madness. We're only interested in two: Europa and Enceladus.
They're very similar (despite Europa belonging to Jupiter and Enceladus to Saturn); So similar that we can generalize both of them into one. The major difference is size; Europa's about twice the size of Enceladus. Other than that you can barely tell 'em apart. They're both huge balls of ice; snowball moons. Utterly inhospitable on their surfaces, they nevertheless represent the best chances for extra-terrestrial life.
How? they're both covered with ice. Ice several miles deep, in fact.
Ah, but UNDER the ice ...
... is water. WARM water.
Wait, what? How is this possible? We're not talking colder than your Frigidiare cold, or even Antarctic cold; we're talking minus 300 odd degrees below zero cold. that's not just cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey, that's cold enough to shatter it into powder with one blow of a ball peen hammer.
But nevertheless, if you could somehow drill down through several miles of rock hard ice, you would find water. Water warm enough, and filled with enough amino acids that, given a few billion years of sloshing around, the chances of life -- complex life -- developing are almost inevitable. How do we get warm liquid water in such an inhospitable place?
One word: torsion.
Europa and Enceladus have one other thing in common: they're the inmost orbiting moons of both their primaries. their orbits are close enough for Jupiter's and Saturn's gravitational pull, working against the gravity of the other moons, to cause massive tidal forces. And what does that mean?
It means the same thing that happens to any closed volatile system when outside energy is introduced: it produces heat. A lot of heat. Enough, over the eons, to keep an entire ocean liquified.
So, with kinetic heat generated by the gravitational equivalent of a huge taffy-pull and a nice insulating cap of ice sitting on top of them, the oceans of Europa and Enceladus could be sitting there, nice and cozy, for millions of years. More than enough time for complex life to develop.
Of course, "complex" is a -- well, complex concept. It could define anything from simple multi-cellular lifeforms you need a microscope and a powerful lot of squinting to see, all the way up to critters that (given the high salinity of the water plus the lesser gravity), could make a blue whale look like a rainbow trout. Hell, why not? As Sagan was known for saying, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." True enough, but if I might humbly propose a codicil: "Extraordinary evidence demands extraordinary imagination to be recognized." Most planetary geologists, exobiologists and the like will pee up one leg and down the other if they find so much as an ice moon's equivalent of a paramecium Out There. Me, I'm voting for the marine equivalent of Argentinosaurus. Something that can pick its teeth with Nessie.
If you're going to dream, why not dream big? We used to think that the clouds of Venus hid a steaming swampy world that teemed with exoraptors. We got rogered real good on that one. But maybe, even though the inner worlds weren't exactly the stuff of which dreams -- or at least masthead novelettes for a nice, shiny nickel a word -- are made, perhaps, in the black depths of those exolunar oceans, a second chance worthy of the name Leviathan may yet lurk.
And now?
My personal odds-on favorites for places most likely to support life in the solar system? Not what you'd think. First off, I wouldn't bother looking in the inner system. Mercury is blasted by a sun so close its apparent disc fills half the sky; even extremophiles would have to wear sunglasses. Venus? Oy. It's hell, pure and simple: victim of millions of years of rampant greenhouse effects that have turned the surface into seething lava beds and the atmosphere into a dense and boiling ocean of sulphuric acid. Mars? The best chance of all the inner worlds, but still not the way to bet. If only it were as big as Earth; but, as they said on Firefly, "if wishes were horses, we'd all be eating steak." Mars was simply too far from the sun, and too small to hang onto its core warmth, and thus its magnetosphere dissipated. With no magnetosphere to protect the planet (think of the magnetosphere as a planetary-sized deflector shield) from the sterilizing UV rays, there wasn't much chance for life to develop.
So we have to look further out. A lot further.
The two biggest planets in our solar system are Jupiter and Saturn. Together, they have over a hundred moons (hell, they probably have thousands if we count rocks from the size of baseballs on up. If you count all the rock and ice fragments making up the rings, we're into millions. This way lies madness. We're only interested in two: Europa and Enceladus.
They're very similar (despite Europa belonging to Jupiter and Enceladus to Saturn); So similar that we can generalize both of them into one. The major difference is size; Europa's about twice the size of Enceladus. Other than that you can barely tell 'em apart. They're both huge balls of ice; snowball moons. Utterly inhospitable on their surfaces, they nevertheless represent the best chances for extra-terrestrial life.
How? they're both covered with ice. Ice several miles deep, in fact.
Ah, but UNDER the ice ...
... is water. WARM water.
Wait, what? How is this possible? We're not talking colder than your Frigidiare cold, or even Antarctic cold; we're talking minus 300 odd degrees below zero cold. that's not just cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey, that's cold enough to shatter it into powder with one blow of a ball peen hammer.
But nevertheless, if you could somehow drill down through several miles of rock hard ice, you would find water. Water warm enough, and filled with enough amino acids that, given a few billion years of sloshing around, the chances of life -- complex life -- developing are almost inevitable. How do we get warm liquid water in such an inhospitable place?
One word: torsion.
Europa and Enceladus have one other thing in common: they're the inmost orbiting moons of both their primaries. their orbits are close enough for Jupiter's and Saturn's gravitational pull, working against the gravity of the other moons, to cause massive tidal forces. And what does that mean?
It means the same thing that happens to any closed volatile system when outside energy is introduced: it produces heat. A lot of heat. Enough, over the eons, to keep an entire ocean liquified.
So, with kinetic heat generated by the gravitational equivalent of a huge taffy-pull and a nice insulating cap of ice sitting on top of them, the oceans of Europa and Enceladus could be sitting there, nice and cozy, for millions of years. More than enough time for complex life to develop.
Of course, "complex" is a -- well, complex concept. It could define anything from simple multi-cellular lifeforms you need a microscope and a powerful lot of squinting to see, all the way up to critters that (given the high salinity of the water plus the lesser gravity), could make a blue whale look like a rainbow trout. Hell, why not? As Sagan was known for saying, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." True enough, but if I might humbly propose a codicil: "Extraordinary evidence demands extraordinary imagination to be recognized." Most planetary geologists, exobiologists and the like will pee up one leg and down the other if they find so much as an ice moon's equivalent of a paramecium Out There. Me, I'm voting for the marine equivalent of Argentinosaurus. Something that can pick its teeth with Nessie.
If you're going to dream, why not dream big? We used to think that the clouds of Venus hid a steaming swampy world that teemed with exoraptors. We got rogered real good on that one. But maybe, even though the inner worlds weren't exactly the stuff of which dreams -- or at least masthead novelettes for a nice, shiny nickel a word -- are made, perhaps, in the black depths of those exolunar oceans, a second chance worthy of the name Leviathan may yet lurk.
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